On 27 August 1776, a month and a half after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, troops from the Continental army fought the British at the Battle of Brooklyn.

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The Americans’ defeat in what is also known as the Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American revolution, would likely have been far worse were it not for a detachment of soldiers from Maryland who prevented encirclement and allowed the US forces to retreat. Most of the Marylanders – known as the Maryland 400, although they were fewer – were killed.

Now, a new battle is being fought over a vacant lot in Gowanus that some believe sits over a mass grave containing the remains of those Maryland soldiers. If it does, preservationists say, the site should be accorded the kind of reverence shown in Lexington, Concord and elsewhere, and preserved from redevelopment.

The New York City government, however, has developed plans to build a pre-kindergarten school on the site, a concrete-covered patch of land close to the intersection of Third Avenue and Eighth Street. Local activists and historians, such as Bob Furman of the Brooklyn Preservation Council, are aiming to scotch that plan.

“Our concern is whether this will be done professionally and fairly,” Furman said, citing controversy over a survey by the same contractor, AKRF, of a building on Duffield Street in Brooklyn that is believed to have been part of the Underground Railroad used by slaves to escape into free states in the mid-19th century.

“We think the game is fixed and they’ll come back with a report saying, ‘Nothing here, move on,’” Furman said. “That’s what we suspect.”

The future of the Gowanus site has been at issue for some time; the authorities have insisted they are playing fair. At a December 2015 hearing on the project, a representative of New York City School Construction Authority told an audience including Furman the SCA was “not a private developer” and followed “rules and regulations of the preservation office”.

The dig is “under way and [has] obviously gathered a lot of attention”, an SCA spokesman told the Baltimore Sun newspaper this week, though he did not say when the AKRF report would be published.

A request for comment from AKRF was not immediately returned.

Furman has spent years sourcing historical records that point to the Gowanus plot as the resting place for 256 Marylanders who died in the Battle of Brooklyn. Others say Brooklyn was a swamp at the time, making a mass grave impractical, and suggest the British victors would have been unlikely to gather the corpses together, choosing instead to bury them where they fell.

Two years ago, Furman led a campaign to petition New York state to purchase the land and transform it into a commemorative area, Marylander Memorial Park.

The subtext of the dispute centers on the significance of an event many feel has been underplayed. In 1776, some 22,000 troops landed in New York harbor aboard the largest invasion fleet to assemble since the Spanish Armada of 1588, in the largest invasion undertaken anywhere until D-Day in 1944.

“The Battle of Brooklyn was the largest of the American revolution, but it doesn’t receive the attention of Lexington and Concord for the simple reason that the Americans lost and we are not people who go for defeat,” Furman said. The Maryland detachment, he said, “prevented the loss from becoming a disaster to end the war”.

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The Marylanders’ stand was noted by soldiers in the field. “My captain was killed, first lieutenant was killed, second lieutenant shot through the hand, two sergeants was killed, one in front of me,” wrote one of the survivors, William McMillan.

Historical evidence has tended to support claims of a mass grave at or near the site. In a 1956 report Dr Nicholas Ryan, a Brooklyn Heights physician, was quoted as saying his father had discovered “the bones of some 30 bodies in regular, or military order” while digging in nearby cellars.

Others believe the Marylanders could be anywhere. The previous owner of the lot rejected requests to dig on the site: in 2012, a spokesman for the Derby Textile Corporation described claims of a mass grave as “a bunch of gibberish”.

The next step will be for AKRF to write up its report on its findings and deliver it to state and city authorities. If the site turns out to be a burial ground, Furman said, the US army will take charge.

“That could mean declaring a national monument or moving the bones to another location,” he said.

The case has, meanwhile, attracted the attention of British actor Sir Patrick Stewart, who lives nearby. He recently asserted his belief that a mass grave lies beneath the lot and, speaking to GQ, said: “It’s worth making, I think, a bit of a fuss of.”